On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 3:40 PM, Thomas Dalton
<thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I'm just going by the statistics, I'm not
making any judgements based
on anything else. At the moment, we seem to be following a logistic
curve which levels out at around 3.5 million articles in around
2013-14. (It's asymptotic, but it will be pretty much there by then.)
So far, "low-hanging fruit" has dominated the growth pattern of
Wikipedia. Rather than approaching a horizontal asymptote, we're
probably approaching a stable growth rate (i.e., an oblique
asymptote), since it's obvious that the number of potential articles
yet to be written is not the limiting factor. Rather we're limited by
a product of potential articles and users interested in those
articles.
But statistically it's probably impossible to know that just from the
data, since low-hanging fruit swamps longer-term trends.
I think we passed to point where low-hanging fruit was a major factor
some time ago (probably round about when we started to level out,
although it obviously depends on your definitions). I think in a few
years the vast majority of existing topics that we want to include
will have at least stubs about them. There will be new topics being
created all the time, so growth will never stop completely (there will
always be a new series of Big Brother to write about!). We might
expand our ideas of what kind of articles are acceptable (ie. relax
our notability guidelines), but that's the only way we are going to
maintain any significant level of article creation about pre-existing
topics.